


That's Kind of the Definition

by Brosedshield



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Gen, Hallucifer, Hallucinations, Implied Torture, PTSD, Pain, Season/Series 07, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Siblings, hallucination Lucifer, hell issues, hell visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-26
Updated: 2013-02-26
Packaged: 2017-12-03 15:58:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/700024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brosedshield/pseuds/Brosedshield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam needs pain to drive Lucifer out of his head. It comes to the point where Dean realizes that he has certain skills that might be of use.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That's Kind of the Definition

**Author's Note:**

> Hurting the one that you love  
> Because that’s what you need,  
> Because that’s what you want,  
> Because you can’t stop:  
> That’s kind of the definition of hell.

Dean comes into their latest crap hotel—really crap this time: holes in the walls, roaches in the holes, hell knows what’s in the roaches—and Sam’s hunched at the mini-table with his head almost touching the bloody fake-wood and a bloody knife on the floor.  
  
Part of Dean panics, and part of him notes the newspaper spread thoroughly and protectively over the table and the floor beneath—not a spur of the moment, hey-I-gotta-knife-may-as-well-try-it-out decision then, but something precisely premeditated—but most of him is too busy half-leaping to Sam’s side, pulling him upright, and turning over his bleeding arm.  
  
“I dropped the knife,” Sam says muzzily. “Don’t know why but my hand…’m sorry, was going to be cleaned up, didn’t want you to know…”  
  
The neat hatch marks on Sam’s forearm are deep. A bit of Dean that he tries not to think about much notes how close he came to slicing a tendon, thinks how he could have done it better.  
  
“Shut up, Sam,” he says without any heat, and turns over his other arm.  
  
These wounds are old, a couple weeks at least, but probably deep enough to have messed with his grip. No wonder he dropped the knife this time. Thank God he didn’t cut his own hands off. Dean presses the scabbing marks and Sam whimpers a little, but he can tell just from the feel of Sam’s forearm under his fingers that there won’t be permanent damage.  
  
Sam is shaking now and Dean pulls him close, tucks Sam’s head against his chest. It’s exhaustion making him shake, and stress and worry and yet Dean figures that his little brother didn’t so much as whimper while he was running a blade through his skin. That’s the kind of fucked up they are.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Sam says, brokenly. “I didn’t want you—“  
  
Dean doesn’t want to hear it again. “Lucifer?”  
  
Sam drags in a stuttered breath. “Yeah. My hand…” He flexes it, the scar there still dark against the skin. “It’s not enough anymore and I—“ He flinches from something only he can see or hear and turns his face into Dean’s jacket.  
  
Dean can hear his brother’s breath rasping into the fabric, and the first moment when he touches his hair, he flinches, before he understands that it’s actually Dean.  
  
It’s not like he didn’t know that Sam had problems, not like he really believed that Sam pressing that one wound would work forever, but he had hoped. The pain of a body is different from the pain of Hell. He can’t really describe it (he only tries when he’s really and truly drunk, which is getting harder and harder all the time) but it’s like in Hell, you know you’re just a soul, and you can’t really kill a soul. You can shred it and break it and remove every inch of a person from it, make it just another power source, something that follows the programming it has been given, whether from love or pain or fucking fate.  
  
But a body knows that it can only go so far and no farther. A man can be broken while alive, while still breathing, certainly he can, but at a certain point when there is no healing the body will shut down, will cease, will end. That awareness makes physical pain _different_.  
  
It makes it better.  
  
Even before the thought is fully formed, Dean’s stomach is clenching around the triangle sandwich he ate when he went out, Sam’s is still in the bag that he’d dropped on the floor when he saw the blood. And it’s not because the thought of what Sam needs disgusts him (it doesn’t, actually; he’s been there, he _is_ there, that’s why he drinks, because he’s been on the other end so long that he doesn’t want the pain so much as the causing of it, the screams under his knife and the knowledge that this, _this, THIS_ he can control) but because there’s another part, someplace between his shoulder blades where Alastair would pat him on the back when he had drawn out a soul’s cries into stuttering and eternal pain, someplace in the rib bones that he watched drawn from his body more times than he can count, broken while he could still feel it.  
  
He wants it. And that scares and revolts and horrifies him more than anything else could.  
  
“You can’t keep cutting yourself,” Dean says. It’s almost a purr. And something inside him is screaming, something is clawing at the edges, but this is for Sam and he has to do it or one day he’s going to come home and find his little brother cut open and it won’t be him, and he doesn’t want to think about how losing him again would break him.  
  
“I have to,” Sam gasps. “I have to, I can’t…it’s worse seeing him, I can take the pain, I _need_ the pain, I just can’t.”  
  
Dean picks the knife up from the table. “I’ll do it.”  
  
Sam’s eyes have a sick sort of hope in them, and part of Dean is pleased, and the rest of him hasn’t stopped screaming (he’s not sure that it ever will, given that it started ages ago when the body he had imagined for himself, the body Alastair permitted, had picked up that first knife). “You would? I’m sorry you have to, but—“  
  
“But you need it.” Dean slides just the edge of the blade along Sam’s throat, and then down to the arm he’d been working on before. “I understand. And this will be safer.”  
  
“Thank you,” Sam says, ragged and grateful, before Dean slides just the tip of the knife into flesh.  
  
Dean is gentle, or as gentle as he can be, and Sam writhes and sobs and thanks him for every cut.


End file.
